It seemed the annual outing for the Glaswegian's severe winter wardrobe had arrived and I was very excited. The overnight temperature in the city had begun to tickle minus 20 and the weatherman had cautioned us all to wrap up warm. There was nothing else for it: cagoule, vest, Dr Martens and bunnet; the apparel favoured by west of Scotland outdoorsmen everywhere. And a flask of Irn-Bru, with just the merest insinuation of Smirnoff.

Glaswegians take their winter precautions seriously and nothing is left to chance. Last week, deploying an ethereal sixth sense, the old man in William Hill had made his annual pronouncement. "That wind could pull the ba' hairs aff a rhino," he declared. Sometimes Tam's meteorological observations have led to FTSE meltdowns. Thus, at the petrol station, the £4.99 bargain bags of de-icer, windscreen fluid and antifreeze were selling fast. And what we didn't consume we could then use on the car. I was now ready to encounter the elements.

At times, though, as I watched and listened to the coverage of Scotland's spectacular weather patterns last week, I thought the reporters were describing a new ice age from which few of us would ever emerge. I was even reminded of Samuel Coleridge's great 1798 poem about the onset of global warming even then, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, which has rightly become the hymn of carbon footprinters everywhere.

The Ice was here, the Ice was there,

The Ice was all around:

It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd –

Like noises of a swound

The entire country, it seemed, lay in the grip of the White Witch. Early on Monday a thick band of snow engulfed all of central Scotland. The M8 was unpassable and hundreds of vehicles were stranded overnight. Everyone was outraged and the transport minister, Stewart Stevenson, was made to endure his day of ordure and yesterday he duly resigned, though he shouldn't have. Even by Holyrood standards, where an army of the bumptious and the unctuous stand over us, Stevenson is in a supercilious class of his own. Just as the igloos were going up all over the west and stilettoed maidens were tottering between snowbound cars, the minister was praising the rapid response of the emergency services before blaming the Met Office for being dilatory with their warnings. The demands for him to resign came fast and shrill from the opposition benches.

Thus we were entertained by the spectacle of Tories expressing disgust at people having to dwell overnight in their cars. Before long their masters at Westminster will be making that the cornerstone of their policy to ease the demand on social housing. He was guilty merely of arrant smugness and looking like Father Jack before the TV 9pm watershed.

Long before the first snowman in Possil has been butted Scotland's army of amateur paleoclimatologists swing into action. We should have seen this coming, they state. We need to get chains on our tyres (I don't know what that means but have nodded vigorously in agreement). The Swedes cope with it better than us. The weather, though, is the most exciting thing that ever happens in Sweden, so they ought to be good at it.

Occasionally, extreme weather happens in Scotland. Having studied this at length I am confident that this is because we are an exposed island sitting in the middle of the north Atlantic. But it doesn't occur often enough for us all to start jouking about in moccasins and husky-drawn sledges.